Author: Phyllis Swartz

Almost forgotten on the top shelf of my closet is an album filled with photos of kids. I owe these kids. They showed me how much I needed to know.

I met them fresh out of their traumas—before foster care, before court hearings, and before treatment. And though my husband and I lived with them as their houseparents at a group home, they’ve mostly disappeared from our lives.

I drag a chair to the closet and stand on tiptoe to reach for the album. And I turn the yellowed pages, poring over photos of kids frozen in the crises of their childhoods.

Page after page, I lament—if only I had known then what I know now.

Shawn, whose father tried to strangle him. Amy, whose mother died. Eric, who had been rejected by his birth parents and two sets of adoptive parents. Kelly, who was caught in a fierce custody battle. Nicole, who had run away, making it to Ohio from Montana before she was caught. Melissa, who had been found in a sting operation when her mom sold her “services” to a trucker.

Nearly fifty such stories.

So much I hadn’t understood back then. So many tools I didn’t have—Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Gardner’s ways of learning, Dabrowski’s intensities, Erikson’s stages of development, Piaget’s cognitive development, Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory, Horkheimer’s critical theory, Bloom’s domains and taxonomies. And more. Much more.

What I did have was love. But a painful reality is that being loved is not the same as being understood. And love without understanding often bewilders and even wounds. My failures to understand filled the group-home kids with angst. And me with questions.

The very best teachers arouse curiosity so students ask questions.

Shawn did this for me. And Nicole. And Eric. And the rest.

After I left the group home, I took my questions to college and graduate school. My search for answers lit up every teacher-training class I took, shaping my pedagogy and making me a better teacher for the thousands of students I taught later in middle school and prison and college.

If only it hadn’t been at the expense of the group-home kids.

Their fading faces in the yellowing album look out at me with brave smiles and bewildered hurt and ill-concealed hostility.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “And I’m sorry, so sorry!”

My nonagenarian dad has a Pennsylvania Dutch saying. He’s apt to toss it out when someone feels regret: Vee get too soon oldt, but too late schmart.

It’s true, of course.

But I wish it weren’t.

The physical therapist takes my mother’s hands.

“Squeeze,” she says, and then actually flinches under my mother’s grip.

My mom hides a smile. She loves surprising doctors and therapists with the strength of her hands.

“I’ve got milking hands,” she tells them.

Starting at age seven, she was in the barn each morning and evening, sitting on a stool beside a cow, her head against its flank, and her hands emptying its udder by squeezing milk into a bucket.

At the average of maybe 500 squirts per cow and with 5 cows per milking, she topped 5000 squirts per day, making more than a million compresses per year of her childhood hand milking.

The therapist is lucky.  My mom’s grip could have been stronger. When she was fourteen, her barn time changed. Milking machines came to the farm.

“Want me to tell you a story?” my mom likes to ask after a grip assessment.

The therapist says yes. They all do. It’s what you say to a ninety-six-year-old.

And so my mom tells about the time she was on a committee to buy carpet for a church sanctuary.

At a flooring store, the committee found exactly what they wanted—the right style, the right color, the right quality. Only the price wasn’t right. And so the committee stood in the showroom wavering.

“Tell you what,” the salesclerk said, as he loosened a strand of fabric from the carpet sampling. “One of you break this strand with your hands, and I’ll give you a discount, a big one.”

He handed the strand to the committee chair. And one to the next guy in line. And the next. None of them could break the strand. My mom was the only one left. But the salesclerk didn’t offer a strand to her.

“Let me try,” my mom said.

She took a strand in into her two hands, snapped it in two, and the price became right.

“Milking hands,” she says now to the therapist. “That’s what did it.”

At ninety-six, my mom’s good grip means she can still open jars and chop vegetables and carry pails of water for her plants. But even more, her grip strength is an indicator of health. Studies show that people with weak grips tend to have higher risks of developing heart disease and stroke and metabolic disorders.

All my life, my mom’s hands have been stronger than mine. She still loosens jar lids I can’t budge.

But then, my hands have been on computer keys far more than on the underside of a cow.

I’m only one of 221 great-grandchildren. But still, I’m one.

And at seven years of age, just learning about death, I go to my great -grandpa’s house to see him laid out in a casket. I squeeze under the elbows of adults to find him in the living room.

In this room I often played with his wooden blocks and listened to people tell stories and perched with a plate on the couch when the dining room table was filled with adults.

I stand on tiptoe at the casket peering in at his beautiful snow-white beard, always soft in my hands. Especially the morning I sat with him in the amen corner at church, twining my fingers through its whiteness this way and that. And watching it jump up and down while he sang. The benediction never again came so fast as it did that morning on my great-grandpa’s knee.

But in the whispery silence of the death vigil this evening, I keep my hands where they belong—out of the casket, and away from the beard.

A lamp on a pole above the casket shines on his face. I’ve never seen such a lamp. It has a pink glow like a sunset. Its shade is a glass bowl with a hole in the bottom. And sprinkled inside are hundreds of what must be snips of hair. I look at the beard in the casket. And at the snips in the lamp. The hairs match. Exactly.

My father nudges me away from the casket. People wait to see Great-grandpa, a whole line of them.  

So I find a seat not far from the casket where I can see the lamp. And think.

Someone else must like Great-grandpa’s beard, too. And decorated the lamp with hair from his beard. Maybe good hair gets you a lamp. I take a peek at the bottom of my braids.

Soon after Great-grandpa dies, we move away from the mountains. To a city, where vigils are in funeral homes.  And I forget about the lamp—until one day, decades later.

I go back to the mountains for my aunt’s funeral. In the churchyard where my great-grandpa is buried, I remember the lamp. And when I see the funeral director standing alone, I tell him my story.

That old lamp, he tells me, is still stored in a backroom of the funeral home.

“We took it to home vigils,” he says, “to soften the appearance of death with a soft, rose-tinted light.”

He grins.

“It wasn’t your grandpa’s beard hair in that lampshade,” he says. “Just a textured lampshade.”

Of course.

Every day I walk by Great-grandpa’s photo on my dining room mantel. It holds the memory of the funeral lamp. And reminds me to be gentle with youthful imaginings.

My brain is too tightly strung, so I go to my garden. It’s a potager, a pocket-size plot that intermingles flowers, herbs, and vegetables—food for the soup pot and beauty for the eyes. And where plants grow up, not out.

The evening is perfect: a white crescent moon rises over our small town, a playful breeze ruffles through the tea, and a hummingbird comes to visit the honeysuckle. Ground cherry plants are just peeping up.

I was six when I decided God’s angels would serve ground cherries at the banquet table in heaven. Healthy candies, that’s what they were, each wrapped like a gift in a papery-thin husk. I sat in my mom’s garden, unwrapping and eating, trying to decide if the taste was pineapple or strawberry or orange. Small wonder that sixty-some years later, I make room for this delicacy in my garden.

Across the brick walkway, I pull a weed from under a rue plant. In Richard II, Shakespeare calls rue a sour herb of grace, linking it with regret. In Hamlet, Ophelia brings an armful of flowers to the royal court. She presents them to the king and queen and gives her flower speech, using each flower to make a point.

“There’s rue for you,” she says. “And some for me.”

And she exhorts the court to wear rue with a difference.

Like it’s my confessional, I bite into the rue’s bitter leaf. And I find comfort in the pairing of sour regret and grace.

In the next bed, painted geraniums creep onto the path. In Victorian gardens, these plants were placed so their scents would be released when brushed by the skirts of passing ladies. In my garden, however, the scent is most likely released by a stray basketball.

Nearby is the moon flower nursery. The plants are waiting to be dug up, one at a time, and scattered though the garden, where they’ll branch out and up as the sun warms the earth.

Some sultry summer night, I’ll come late to the garden, looking for a breeze blowing in the tea. And bright-white, dinner-plate size flowers will bloom under the night sky. Each bud blooms only once. And only at night. Each flower will be dead by morning. But the next night, new buds will bloom. Angel trumpets, some call them.

My brain will calm as I sit under the moon among the moon flowers. I’ll breathe in the mint and the sharp spices of sage and cilantro and parsley and basil. The night lights will show that tomatoes have grown up their trellises and that squash has covered a v-shaped arbor. I might sample a ground cherry.

And if regrets push into my peace, I’ll think also of grace.

We’re driving through a bumpy stretch of Route 76 in Pennsylvania, coming back from our fiftieth wedding anniversary trip. For five days—a day per decade of marriage—our scattered family came together, first on a ship and then on the island of Bermuda. It’s likely the last time for such a family fling. We’re about to get even more scattered as our young adult grandchildren head into their own lives.

During this celebration,” our children said, “tell us your stories, a decade a day. We want our kids to hear.”

Every day they showed up, these big, beautiful grandkids, leaving waterslides and pools and basketball courts and ice cream shops to hear two old people talk. And with such good grace, even asking questions to extend stories.

After we told the last story on the last day, they gave us a jar of their memories, fifty of them. And now, as my husband and I drive home through the bumpy stretch on Route 76, we read what they remember.

• A terrifying hike on White Mountain during a thunderstorm at night.
• Watching Grandpa lose it during the tarantula scene in Home Alone.
• Walking around the art museum with Grandma.
• Watching A Christmas Carol.
• Playing tickle monster with Grandpa.
• Bible school during Cousin Week.
• Playing Monopoly with Grandpa and slowly getting decimated.
• Walking around UK during Jon’s track race and talking about my future plans.

We’re glad we did these things. This is what we keep saying as we read. Glad we showed up for basketball games and track meets and graduations. Glad we cooked for Cousin Week and dug through compost for fishing worms and helped with science projects. Glad we sat on the porch swing and held them as we read endless stories.

For sure, we didn’t do it all right! We bumbled and fumbled, learning to be grandparents in much the same way we learned to be parents. Sometimes we said too much, sometimes too little. Sometimes we said the wrong things. Other times we said the right things in the wrong way.

But we kept showing up.

And maybe this is why they showed up at story time this week. And listened, really listened.

Or maybe they had some good parental coaching!

“Eine blinde sow find alsemow ein chest,” my dad says to me the other day.

He does this occasionally—breaks out into Pennsylvania Dutch, the language of his childhood.

So I’m not surprised. But I can tell he’s said something about a pig, so I’m confused.

What we’re working on has nothing to do with pigs. It’s a history presentation he hopes to give next year when he’s 93. And we’re constructing a chart for an accompanying slide, trying to get numbers to line up in a grid. As he watches me work, he’s the one who figures it out. It’s supposed to be the other way around.

“Good for you, Dad!” I say.

And that’s when he spouts out the Pennsylvania Dutch, which translated means Even a blind sow once in a while finds a chestnut.

But this isn’t a good analogy. For one thing, the pig part doesn’t work. And besides, for being ninety-two, he isn’t blind about technology. Actually, for any age, he isn’t blind.

He might no longer travel with ease. Or walk around his town. Even moving from room to room brings challenges.

But secure in his office chair and using his computer, he reads documents in national and state archives. He accesses newspapers from far away and long ago. He traces ancestry and accesses personal collections through history websites. He reads out-of-print books in the HathiTrust Digital Library. And from what he learns, he creates documents, saves them in files, organizes them in folders, and backs them up on an external hard drive. And when he doesn’t know how to do something, he figures it out.

He does all this to follow his passion—teaching people about history, especially the church history of his beloved Casselman Valley in western Maryland and Pennsylvania. And he sticks to this task for hours each day, scouring source after source, looking for exactly what he needs.

Come to think of it, maybe my dad’s analogy does work. He probably does feel blind sometimes, as he searches here and there, often with no results. And he’s sure got a pig-headed tenacity when it comes to this foraging.

“Look at this!” he says when I poke my head into his study.

And sure enough—he has found a chestnut.

For our family, it happened four times last week—the turning of tassels, the tossing of hats, and the taking of family pictures. And in each grandparent picture, I felt dwarfed by these young men I used to carry in my arms, sometimes two at a time.

These graduates, who seemed to come all at once, helped us start the Cousin Week tradition that has continued for nearly two decades. During each of last week’s photo shoots, an old picture kept coming to my mind—the four of them lined up during an early Cousin Week. And when I got home, I found it.

They kept us busy that week. And busy last week, traveling some 1700 miles to get to their events.

When we opened our car doors at the graduation party in Kentucky, we could hear the singing of over a million uninvited guests, cicadas—specifically, Brood 14 of the 17-year periodical cicadas. They were babies together, these noisy guests and our four grandsons, the cicadas spending their pre-emergent lives underground, and the boys in the safety of their parents’ homes.

While our grandsons were drinking milk and eating pizza, the cicadas had been feeding on xylem and drinking sap from tree roots. And while the boys rode scooters and bikes and played basketball and ran the fastest miles they could, the cicadas were busy too, excavating tunnels through the soil.

But this spring, when the soil warmed and the flowers bloomed, the cicadas came up to look at the earth through their red, popped-out eyes. In Kentucky, which is the epicenter for the emergence of this brood, they blanketed trees, fences, sidewalks, and decks decorated for graduation parties.

But only for a few weeks. After the males “sing” to attract females and females click when they like a song, they mate. And after the females lay their eggs, the adults die—not living to see their young, who burrow underground for their own childhoods.

Unconcerned with their coming demise, the emergent cicadas partied right along with the boys, singing and clicking and dive-bombing people, and drinking plant juice from young twigs and small branches. No cares encumbered them. There’s no room in their miniscule brains, after all, to fret about college majors and scholarships and summer jobs.

Our grandsons ate homemade soft pretzels and ice cream treats, chatted with friends, accepted cards and gifts, and treated their elders with due respect and appreciation. But under the gaiety, background thoughts likely looped through their brains. They’re heading out to perhaps the most uncertain and thrilling parts of their lives so far. They’ve got choices to make and consequences to go with those choices. They’re stepping toward independence.

Sometimes I’d like to take them back in my arms, to keep them safe and solve their simple problems. But I’m glad they’re emerging. And though my arms aren’t large enough to hold them, my heart still can.

“How are you this morning?” I asked my ninety-six-year-old mom about a month ago.

She barely looked at me.

“Weary and worn on the pathway below,” she said.

And without a smile.

But not anymore. Her neck still hurts. And her hands. Her steps are still slowing. And her memory fading. But she’s got her pluck back. Spring is here.

So I took her to London Florist the other day. For a week before our outing, she pored over a photo album, one that showed her flowerbeds of past years. One summer, she won the Prettiest Porch Award in our town. Not because she applied, but because someone drove by, took a photo of her porch, and submitted it.

But now the beds around her porch have been modified. After she broke her foot while gardening, we convinced her to reach out for help.

And so her grandson, who studies landscape architecture, redesigned the beds for a college project. He filled them with flowering shrubs and blue holly and perennials, aiming to make them beautiful. And low maintenance.

But he left her two beds—a narrow plot along the driveway and one set apart by a semicircle of rocks—which is why we went to London, Florist, where she was treated like a queen.

“Come with me, ma’am,” said the owner, who offered an arm.

And he took her to find what she really wanted—a plant she remembered from her mother’s garden. Scarlet sage, she thought it was called.  But it wasn’t the right plant.

My mom explained some more.

“Red salvia,” he said. “You want red salvia. I’ll order it for you.”

Back at home, my mom consulted her photo albums while I planted the flowers.

Most days, we work together outside, pulling weeds, giving some Miracle Grow here, and extra water there. My mom might be tired at the end of these sessions. But she’s no longer weary and worn.

“I wish,” she said this morning, “that I could tell my mom what we’ve been doing out here in the garden.”

And the premonition came to me that someday I’ll wish the same thing.

“Just once,” an anxious teenager tells me, “I wish someone could get inside my brain and see what it’s like.”

And I wish I could.

A few days later, I sit in the waiting room of a dermatologist. Behind the counter, two receptionists chat about a twenty-year old man who had left their office.

“Screaming like that!” one said with a shake of her head. “Like a child.”

And I wonder—was he a wimp? Or did pain pass through his brain in an unusual way?

What would the receptionist say if she could crawl inside his mind?

The problem is that we’re all stuck inside our own heads. Yet, we operate with the belief that we’re not, that our own experiences match the world as it is, and that others who differ from us are wrong, maybe even crazy.

It’s easy to forget that what we experience is highly governed by how our bodies and their systems are put together. If the munching of potato chips caused your heart rate to increase and cortisol to course through your veins, as it does for people with misophonia, you’d find eating in a lunchroom to be an entirely different experience.

We can’t be blamed, of course, for having to stay inside our own heads. Our brains won’t let us out. But there is something we can do—have the humility to be more curious than certain about other people’s experiences.

My problem is that I like to feel certain. This puts me in the role of an expert, able make judgements, give advice, and take control. But this impulse for certainty hurts relationships. Even when I think I’m acting in another’s best interests, I can come too close to making that person over in my image.

It’s only when I quiet my problem-solving impulses, when I become curious enough to ask questions, only then do I have a chance to understand what otherwise seems utterly mystifying. I can’t get inside an anxious teen’s head, but I can discover more of what’s in there.